Martin Wittenberg, Professor of Economics and Director of DataFirst at the University of Cape Town presented his work on restructuring a 20-year health and demographic surveillance study based in South Africa showing an example of big data analysis using night-time satellite data from NASA as a proxy to explore the impact of electrification on South Africa’s economic development over time, highlighting the exciting opportunities that lie ahead for using big data in the social sciences.
Louise Corti presented on how national statistics offices around the world have been exploring alternative sources of collecting data on citizens (instead of surveys and censuses), and showed an uk rcs data example looking at tourism data from World Heritage Sites on Wikipedia. Participants worked in groups to devise their own national statistics focused ideas for analysis including:
Public Health: Understanding how Google searches on medical terms reflect disease prevalence and how bias in the data might be related to rural/urban access to technology, and the use of specialist terminology;
Crime Rates: intervention by mapping crime rates over time using aggregated provincial crime stats and police station reports of crime and location;
Transport: Studying transport policies to assess different needs for private and public transport. The team used Google tracking location for traffic showing how different categories of commuters are likely to experience different commuting times and local weather station pollution data as a proxy for congestion and emissions.